THE EIGHT STUPIDEST THINGS I USED TO WASTE MONEY ON

July 14, 2015

So let’s say you’ve had a wake up call of some sort, and you’re ready to start yourself on the path towards financial health. Where do you even begin?

For me, the best thing I did was sign up for a financial tracking program — specifically Mint.com — to get a handle on just where the hell my money was going every month. It only took a few months of tracking my every transaction on Mint to realize that I was dying by a thousand cuts, letting money slip through my fingers in tiny increments.

The second benefit of tracking your spending through a program like Mint is that you can look back on your spending from years past and ask yourself, WTF was I thinking?!?

Let’s take a journey through time, shall we? Here’s a list of the STUPIDEST things I used to spend my money on before I got control of my finances. A note that almost every purchase below was made in the same month!

1. Credit card interest

2. Kindle books

Now I exclusively get my books at the local library. Occasionally I’ll buy a book that I spot at Goodwill.

3. Cheap online games that I only ended up playing for a day or two.

I still buy video games, but now I wait until I’m sure it’s a game I really want, and then I usually end up playing 50+ hours on it over the course of many months or years. No more single-bite flash games.

4. Expensive coffee

5. Late fees, ATM fees and foreign transaction fees

Was it really that hard to return the Redbox DVD for two days?

Not in the same month, but I still can’t believe I used to leak pennies to these things. I hadn’t discovered no-fee credit cards yet, and hadn't learned to plan ahead for cash purchases so that I could remember to hit up my bank's ATM or get cash at the grocery store along with my food purchase.

6. Storage unit for items I couldn’t fit in my apartment

Luckily I only paid for storage for a month or two while moving between apartments. But it would have been easy to let this run on month after month, until I forgot what was even in there!

7. Fast fashion

Two trips in one day! I probably ended up giving half the clothes to Goodwill a few months later.

And the absolute stupidest thing I used to waste my money on is…

8. Ridiculous monthly subscriptions that I was too lazy to cancel

One time I was trying to find someone’s phone number or something on the internet, and I paid for one of those services that compiles someone’s entire address and contact info history. And then I paid $19.95 a month for it for a while until I bothered to cancel it… WTF

I also got sucked in by those Bare Minerals commercials. Who else spent their childhoods watching the infomercial on loop? Just me? Okay then.

I could kick myself for how long I paid $19.99 a month to have makeup shipped to my house that I never ever used!

All told, I straight out wasted $350 on this absolute, utter crap in just a single month. And then I wondered why I couldn’t get ahead! Tracking my finances forced me to stare these individual mistakes in the face and realize that they added up to a big problem.

If you have a story of things you can’t believe you once spent money on — particularly monthly subscriptions! the worst! — let me know in the comments.